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Healthy youth places project promoting nutrition, physical activity By Keener A. Tippin II
If you provide it, will they take advantage of it -- five servings of fruit and vegetables and physical activity on a daily basis, that is? Research has indicated that proper nutrition and a physically active lifestyle are two important preventive health behaviors for children and adolescents. Yet, as they reach the pre-adolescent and adolescent years, a dramatic drop-off in physical activity occurs. Poor diets, especially lower fruit and vegetable consumption, typically become the norm.
"What we're doing in this project is studying whether in fact these environmental variables such as opportunities to be active and eat fruits and vegetables actually do relate to youth behavior," Dzewaltowski said. "We're also studying whether you can change the environment or how you might do so to provide the options for kids to chose healthy behaviors if they want to. "We know the middle school years are a critical time in youth development as it relates to these two important health behaviors," Dzewaltowski continued. "One reason is that even during these years you're starting to influence your risk for cancer and cardiovascular disease by your behavior -- even as a youth -- but these behaviors also tend to track into adulthood. So if you start bad habits in middle school they'll tend to carry on through adulthood." Dzewaltowski said the research team, which also consists of nutrition, physical activity youth experts Judy A. Johnston, Paul Estabrooks, George Milliken and others, has some evidence for that. The team is hypothesizing that it would be easier for an individual to start being physically active and eat a healthy diet as a middle schooler and carry that across the life span rather than having to change their behavior when they are adults. Dzewaltowski said researchers have randomized eight schools to a strategy that attempts to build healthy environments to promote activity. These environments, called "healthy places" and specifically the schools, try to create healthy school lunch and afterschool program environments to promote activity and good fruit and vegetable consumption. The study then follows a group of children who are in sixth grade as they progress through the seventh, eighth and ninth grades to see what happened to their health behaviors, compared to children in schools where researchers simply monitored students. Dzewaltowski said the four-year, $1.7 million study funded by the Department of Health and Human Services and the National Institutes of Health is creating a social norm in schools that healthy behavior is a good thing. "The hypothesis here is that if youth participate in creating a healthy environment in the school where they have the opportunity to make healthy choices, they will," Dzewaltowski said. "The novelty is most human services programs have focused on health education and the idea to teach children to eat better, teach them the food guide pyramid and those sorts of things or teach youth the importance of being active. That's based on the assumption that knowledge will lead to them being healthy. "We are realizing in the public health field now that most of the determinants aren't necessarily knowledge," Dzewaltowski continued. "People know that they need to eat well and be physically active -- but have to do with the environments that they live, learn and play in offering healthy options or not." Summer 2003 |
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study by David Dzewaltowski, director of the Kansas State University Research
and Extension office of community health, and a team of researchers creates
a youth involvement model that encourages students to get involved in
the process of changing their schools. By being involved in that process,
the school will not only be more likely to meet their needs, but it will
also get kids involved and more interested in the options that the school
is offering.